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Flocking and schooling

PostPosted: Fri Dec 04, 2015 12:30 pm
by haze
In my off time I've written a script to simulate flocking in Octane. It does this by scattering a number of meshes and rotating them to face a certain direction, and applying the Boids rules to them repeatedly. The result is a realistic looking (and very configurable) school of fish, or flock of birds. You can generate the exact same sequence of movements over and over again without storing the translations/rotations - just by keeping the random seed value that you started with. In other words, for a convincing flock/school irrespective of size, it only takes around 32 bytes of storage.

You can make these fish do anything - you could tell them to collectively move over to a certain location, avoid a certain area, etc etc with minimal effort.

I've made a short movie clip of one such animation. I'd like to gauge interest - being a personal project, if there was enough interest I would spend more of my own time developing this into a configurable GUI and make it easier to use, then release it.

Re: Flocking and schooling

PostPosted: Fri Dec 04, 2015 2:25 pm
by bepeg4d
Wow, very powerful :o
Count me in :)
ciao beppe

Re: Flocking and schooling

PostPosted: Sat Dec 05, 2015 2:14 am
by pegot
This is really neat! I'm interested. Would this only be available in Standalone or could the script also work in the Blender plugin?

Re: Flocking and schooling

PostPosted: Sat Dec 05, 2015 2:15 am
by prehabitat
This looks great!

Re: Flocking and schooling

PostPosted: Sun Dec 06, 2015 11:36 pm
by haze
pegot wrote:This is really neat! I'm interested. Would this only be available in Standalone or could the script also work in the Blender plugin?


Theoretically it can, but I'm not sure that the plugin allows you to load a lua script for Octane itself to execute

Re: Flocking and schooling

PostPosted: Mon Dec 07, 2015 2:04 am
by prehabitat
Actually reminds me of leaves/seed pods falling on a slight uplifting wind,

Can it be used with similar random movement but a plane (below) being the anchor? (Ie gravity)?

Or even better could chose two influencers; gravity and wind...

Re: Flocking and schooling

PostPosted: Mon Dec 07, 2015 8:41 am
by haze
Yes - it is very easy to do so. In fact, if I developed it further I would probably have a list of points or perhaps geometry to fly or swim around/away-from/towards etc.

Re: Flocking and schooling

PostPosted: Tue May 31, 2016 2:56 pm
by Inverse404
Such a function would be super awesome, can we try out your dev script node ?

Re: Flocking and schooling

PostPosted: Wed Aug 24, 2016 12:13 am
by haze
Here it is. Please remember it is really not a finished product.. You can currently only go forwards in time with the sim.